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Free Will (Even For The Gods)
Free Will (Even For The Gods) We the gods are less than mortals in a fundamental way. They cannot match the heights of our powers, they are short-lived, they can be venal, banal and small. But mortals have no Aspect. Aspect, some would say it is the keystone of our greatness, the fulcrum on which our individual power turns. A god of battle is a fearsome thing to behold, awe-inspiring and almost unstoppable, the fulfillment of their Aspect granting them a terrible power when they clash arms. As everyone among us knows, a god in the fullness of their aspect is nothing short of magnificent. If that god is ruled by their Aspect though: place them in a position requiring patience, empathy, understanding and -though they may well possess these traits- the god will in that moment seem cruel, vengeful, bloody-minded. The stories of the gods are benighted with tragedy, no matter what the pantheon. I won’t recount them here, I know well that what is a poetically tragic fable to one listener is a painful memory to another. How much of that tragedy relates to the expression of a god’s Aspect, their story playing out hopelessly towards a conclusion determined not by their will, their compassion, but by an Aspect they were bound to from birth? I am young and what’s more I am new. I grew up as a mortal, my true nature hidden from me and I came to my first experiences with the gods remembering how the world looked to mortal eyes. In my short time on this earth and among the gods I have seen incredible things, things worthy of legend themselves: but nothing I have seen has moved me like the courage of those gods I saw act with free will rather than as defined by their aspect. I have a friend, indeed an aunt. She too grew up as a mortal, named Mercedes. She was cruel and capricious for years, perhaps expressing her Aspect as Eris, or Strife. She was confronted with her true nature as a god in a time of great pain and for a time it seemed she would succumb completely to that Aspect, going from casually cruel to something far more sinister, malice backed by the power of a god. She experienced doubts, then started to turn away from this cruelty, feeling she had lost enough time to it. She spoke to someone she knew, someone who struggled under the weight of his own Aspect. He said to her: “You’re changing, leaving all that meanness behind, turning to Mercy instead. That’s how I think of you now, partly for selfish reasons because anyone can see: The Godkiller needs some Mercy in his life.” My father has become infamous among many and I won’t try to debate most of that here. I will however look at some of the things he said and did, because after The Tartarus War he said something in a recording he left me that I think he never got a chance to tell the rest of the world. He said the war he and my mother and their companions fought was not just vengeance against Erebus, it was not even just a rescue of his own father, it became something more: it became a rebellion, a war of Aspect. Erebus had decided my father would be a god of Fate, a reaper, his dark right hand. My father struggled with his own Aspect, in some ways they mirrored the struggles of the adolescent trying to define himself rather than be defined by the older generation but these struggles were also metaphysical in nature. Hera named him The Godkiller and of course the name stuck. He refused it at first, then used it where it suited him but I think every time the word passed his lips he paid a price. He wanted to be something more than just The Godkiller, to me he seems like the old Marshals of the American West, fierce and driven by justice, but of course I’m a young man romanticizing the father he never got to meet. I do know that at the end he tried to turn to peace. After slaying Erebus he buried his weapons and tried to find a new path, I think I was to be part of that journey for him but perhaps we’ll never know. This is not just biography though: I tell these details because they have bearing on the idea of Aspect, Fionn Corvin struggled -most often unsuccessfully- against his own Aspect but he also became a force for change among the gods themselves. Not just change by bloodshed, not just change by the deaths of the gods but change by thought, change of ideas. As he prepared to put an end to Lucifer’s imprisonment, my father gathered around him many whose Aspects were burdens to them. I think some of his ideas were born in the terrible bloodshed he saw and indeed perpetrated. It is well-known that The Godkiller became stronger as he went on, even absorbing some of the powers of those he killed. I believe that this came with a terrible price: each time he killed, a tiny part of him became the god he killed. This gave him an insight into Aspect like none before him, not even Lucifer himself. Fittingly -at least from my point of view- the first god whose Aspect my father challenged was Apate, Deception, my mother. As he put it, he knew from the first time they spent any time together that though her Aspect was Deception, her heart was true. I am the child of that union, conceived on one battlefield and born on another and I am both their physical offspring and the product of their ideas. The conflicts were bloody but they were about more than blood. The Tartarus War was many things: brutal, bloody, tragic. It was not only those things though. I believe The Tartarus War was a theological debate played out on the field of battle. On one side was the belief that Aspect must define our actions and on the other was the hope that we can rise above it, become more. I know that my father hated Erebus but I do not, perhaps I cannot. He was my grandfather, my mother’s father. I am too connected to too many of the players in this story to feel real hate, even for those whose actions ensured two generations of my family grew up without their fathers and my father had his chance at redemption -raising his son- taken from him. Perhaps this is one of the missing ingredients when we the gods look at Aspect and one another. The other pantheons are so far removed from us that there is nothing to empathise with, to identify with. Even the other gods of our own pantheon are sometimes reduced to their core stereotype -their Aspect- in our eyes. Why should I listen to what a god of Peace has to say if we’re speaking of War? Why should the opinion of a god of Love matter if the debate is about the politics of the gods? Eternity is a long time and we are all in this together, all of our Houses and Pantheons. Over the course of this much time, the things that separate us seem trivial and small. We all suffer, one way or another. We all need Hope. I believe my father learned something of empathy for the gods through the bloodiest path possible, but he was taken from this world before he could put those lessons to use. He learned about the weight and burden of Aspect by experiencing the Aspects of other gods. I inherited some of this from him along with a terrible gift, my well-documented Warchild identity. I am closely tied to the Aspect of war and battle, I have inherited some of my father’s gift for it and certain instincts too. I believe the only thing I can do with these gifts that will honour my father is refuse to be ruled by them. I can see the hidden potential for change in all of us gods, that is perhaps the greatest gift my father and mother passed on to me. When I first started out with these ideas they were instinctive beliefs about the nature of our universe, this universe that we inhabit that mortals do not perceive. When I first started to encounter the gods the thought was so simple it could have been a lesson one would give to a child, a nursery rhyme that doesn’t rhyme. Gods that are slaves to their Aspect are worst Gods that can defy their Aspect are better Gods that define their own Aspect are best Where these waters become muddy is when we start to ask: is this Aspect idea simply about free will, or is it about altruism? Surely a god of Healing who does nothing but ease the pain of others should not be -as described above- among the worst? And if that god were to defy their aspect and refuse to heal anyone, would they somehow be better than they had been before? The god who heals because he must is no menace to the world and I wish them nothing but happiness. If that god considers their actions and decides to heal the sick because they can and because they choose to, then yes, I consider that a higher level of being. Outside the moral question, the god who has no say in their actions is not free. If those actions benefit others then I cannot bring myself to criticize it, even as I feel pained by a feeling I cannot shake that the god is not truly living, merely carrying out their function. Who would dare to try to bend the will of a god? Who would dare to try to subjugate the very gods? Whether magic or brute force, any who try will see how difficult it is to do, far more-so than to bend the will of a mortal. There is a contradiction in this though: We the gods have our wills bent all the time by our own Aspect. We think or feel one way but then our Aspect comes into play and the rest is decided for us. Not so for the mortals. They can be pushed, bullied, beaten, dominated, but for all that, inside their own minds they have a freedom we can only dream of. But we CAN dream of it...and we can get close to it. I lived as a mortal first. Then I was a scion, pushed this way and that by Aspect. An old enemy of my father’s, Pecos Bill, rode right out of Hell as a hate demon to kill me. And though he wounded me I shot him down just as I imagined my father would have. When I woke from my injuries I was troubled, I asked those I loved that were around me whether I was even a man or just a creation, a thing of violence, something worse than the Frankenstein monster. Mercy was there. She put her hand over my heart and stilled the deadly instincts I live with, gave me peace using her own hard-won aspect of clemency. I think in that moment some part of me that I had worried did not survive the battle with Pecos Bill was reborn. A god acting of her own free will, in her self-defined Aspect, granted peace and clarity to another, allowing him some space to consider his own Aspect. When Bill came back from Hell one more time I didn’t fight him anymore, he and I grappled as he tried to use his pistol and I talked to him, nothing more. Eventually I told him he was once the God of Cowboys and that was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. I told him I couldn’t fight him anymore, I had to sit this dance out. I finally said “Please.” He replied “I really was something, kid,” then he just... let go. I didn’t kill him, I was present when he found peace. I mourned him as I would a friend and placed a stone out where he died to commemorate him. I couldn’t live with the Aspect I felt claiming me, killing came so easy, even killing a god. In the end, Bill couldn’t live with the Aspect he had taken anymore either. He had been the God of Cowboys and become corrupted, further and further through the years but he died returning to it rather than holding onto his hate. So it’s not an easy question. I rejected the Aspect I could not live with and Bill chose to return to his. What Bill did and what I aspire to do -and I aspire for all of us to do- is really CHOOSE an Aspect, rather than be chosen by one. I will close by talking about some of the people I have met and what they have taught me about this subject. Mercy started out as Mercedes, then she almost fully became Eris, but she chose something different, joined my father’s house, House Corvin as the god of Clemency. War himself, one of the Four Horsemen, turned from his Aspect on the battlefield in Tartarus, an act of such astounding courage that I am humbled by it. He turned from it again when we went to talk to Zeus, Hera and Ares, agreeing that we would go there in peace and not take a single life. War has not become weaker by acquiring some agency within his own Aspect. Rather he has become stronger and now, when he goes into battle it is he that fights, not his Aspect. I hope he will forgive me for presuming to speak for him like this. Leviathan, Prince of Envy, overcame his Aspect to become the God of Sergeants, down there in Tartarus, the very day I was born. In conversation with my friend Eddie Eckstein, the God of Metal, I discovered we had some thoughts in common. He broke the world down for me thus: That which is metal is best That which is not metal is less good That which is not metal but pretends to be metal is worst Without that conversation with Eddie I would not have put these words on paper. Eddie is also called Magni, god of strength, son of Thor. He has taken on the Aspect of God of Metal and leads us all by example. I have never met my father but he left me some tapes, some notes. I believe I’m continuing his work. His real work. I have chosen an Aspect, I can only strive to live up to these examples. I chose the thing I needed most: Hope.